Emily Meggett didn’t like waiting on New York publisher Abrams Books to publish her cookbook, Gullah Geechee Home Cooking: Recipes from The Matriarch of Edisto Island, but then the Lord told her that is what she should do.
She told The New York Times in an interview last year, “I thought I would be dead and gone because of Covid by 2022. But I prayed about it, and said, ‘Let’s do it.”
Her book sums up the cooking of the Gullah Geechee people on the Atlantic coast of the southern states. Enslaved and isolated on plantations on the islands and coast, the Africans created a unique Creole culture that blended African heritage and Christian spirituality. Her kitchen was an inspired tableau of their cooking with rice, seafood, and fresh local vegetables. She also slow-cook one-pot meals like chicken perloo and okra soup. Her dishes could also be quite complex like stuffed shad which was deboned, and filled with parsley rice, sewed up, and cooked. The dish takes two days to prepare.
When her kitchen door was open, that was an invitation to anyone needy and hungry to come by. She also would travel around the island taking food to those who couldn’t afford a meal.
The Lord works in mysterious but wonderful ways, and she was able to see her book published last year. It became a bestseller before Meggett’s move to Heaven. The dazzling cook always said that she would only leave the “little bit of Heaven” of Edisto Island for the big move upstairs. May she rock with Jesus. And order her book!
A celebration of her life and faith will be held by First Missionary Baptist Church in Edisto, South Carolina will be broadcast on Saturday, starting at 11 am, live-streamed from Smith-McNeal Funeral Home. Here is a foretaste of a little bit of Heaven:
